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It’s striking how long men’s troubles have gone unnoticed. Men account for roughly 80% of suicides in the United States and nearly three out of every four “deaths of despair,” a term coined by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton for the combination of deaths due to drug overdoses, alcohol-related deaths, and suicides (Case & Deaton, 2021; Reeves, 2022). And this pattern extends past mortality as well: Among Americans aged 25 to 34, 47% of women now hold a bachelor’s degree compared to 37% of men, a gap that did not exist as recently as 1995 (Pew Research Center, 2024), while the share of men ages 25 to 54 outside the labor force entirely has roughly doubled since the 1970s, rising from 5.8% to 11.4% (Bengali et al., 2023).

The consequences of men’s struggles affect everyone. For instance, when young men’s economic prospects collapse, marriage and fertility fall along with them, premature mortality rises, and a larger share of children end up in single-parent households below the poverty line (Autor et al., 2019). Unemployment is itself a documented cause of depression, and meta-analytic evidence across hundreds of studies finds the effect is stronger for men than for women (Paul & Moser, 2009). The downstream costs to those children are also well established, with the most rigorous designs continuing to find that father absence reduces high school graduation and harms social-emotional adjustment and adult mental health (McLanahan et al., 2013). Men who are struggling also make less reliable partners and less present fathers, and this places a further burden on women to pick up the slack. Thus, anyone invested in how women and girls are doing has a direct stake in men possessing a positive and healthy masculinity.

Unfortunately, there’s a strong social trend that sees masculinity itself as the problem (APA, 2018; Reeves, 2022), and it’s taboo in many parts of American society to talk about any area where men might have a relative strength. This leads to a portrayal of masculinity as........

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